The folks as the local big box store are upselling MonsterCable's "home theater power center" They are talking about how it cleans up the dirty power coming from a normal household power supply and improves sound and picture quality. What are your thoughts on that? Never heard of Dirty / Clean power before.

It is a useful, if overpriced, device to help protect your gear from spikes in power that could damage it.

Serious power related problems can include a ground loop hum, not solved by the above, or serious brownouts and spikes as mentioned above. As far as dirty power somehow effecting the analogue wave that gets fed to your speaker to make it produce sound...... Some will argue but I fall in the camp that if you really have power that bad, you need an electrician, not a Monster Power Center.

Edit:
I also wanted to add that even if I just wanted a good power bar, I wouldn't buy Monster, if only based on their extremely shady marketing practices on similarly overpriced speaker and AV cable.

An excellent investigative journalism piece on the HDMI scam.
CBC's Marketplace - HDMI cables

You are in good hands with Murph . As he mentioned, a UPS (uninterrupted power supply) would be far more beneficial as it will protect you from possible brownouts (especially if you live in a rural area and are at the end of the line). UPS's will protect your equipment from power irregularities by maintaining constant voltage, which is important with plasma TVs especially; an ISF certified calibrator recently informed me of this.

Is there such a thing as wall mountable UPS? Specifically one that mounts in a single/dual junction box? I know I can get surge suppressors like that, but all this talk of UPS's makes me think ahead.

You wouldn't get much run time on a UPS with batteries that small. So, no there aren't any UPSes which fit within a junction box.

At work we have the UPSes hidden away in the room with the breaker panel. They are hardwired between the panel and the outlets which need backup power. These also use regular truck batteries, which can be connected in parallel for what ever amount of run time you want.

I only use a $28 Belkin surge protector.
So far so good.

I have my eye on this one . I don't care about the supposed power conditioning function of it, but rather that it is an affordable UPS that has AVR (automatic voltage regulation), which is the main function you should look for when buying a UPS.

Mmmmm...Oval-y.......